"No, there''s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem -- well, like you. Like you did something, all right, and now you''re suffering for it. You know?" I said nothing. "Well you know," he said, impatiently, "why do people suffer? Maybe it''s better to do something to give it a reason, any reason." --James Baldwin, Sonny''s Blues HERE When the doctor calls I''m standing in the kitchen in my little house in Minneapolis, drinking the grit-end of this morning''s coffee I''ve just microwaved, and as soon as the doctor says the words about Hedwig Baum -- about mother -- the girl who runs away comes back into my bones. She takes over like a wave of fear, or a surfer on the back of one. The first thing she does is put down the coffee and get me into the bedroom, to grab the old camera from its place atop the cabinet where I keep all my gear.

As soon as my hands lift that old, coated brass machine, and as soon as she''s slung its strap around my neck -- something that I do most days, only without her--I know she''s built up too much momentum to stop. To stay. This camera, this old Leica III, was her camera. Mother''s, the mother whose dementia the doctor is telling me has appeared to have taken completely her already dwindling capacity of speech. The dementia she''s been living with about half as long as the seventeen years she had with me. While the doctor talks into my ear the girl pulls the piece of luggage out from under the bed, luggage that I don''t think I''ve used since Genny and I went to Chicago, in 2007, for a talk I was giving on the body as an indirect object in figure-based art. The talk that came after I''d watched the I-35W bridge collapse into the Mississippi from the bridge''s east twin, watching it and Genny''s trust for engineering and the infrastructure and our world fall out ofsight. Luggage I''d not used since I tried to take her away from here to try and pull her out from that.

"We''ve been keeping an eye on her," the doctor says, as the packing continues, "and she hasn''t spoken as far as we can tell in roughly a week. Her responsiveness to being addressed has also decreased. She has had accidents. Well, more." This is the first time the running girl has come to usurp my body since I ran away to Hamburg, Germany in 1991 to escape Genny and the relationship I''d thought I was in, to try and get away from the me that I''d been living as, which had suddenly felt like a lie. The first time the running girl ever took over completely was when I ran away from mother, from Winnipeg, with Genny when I was seventeen. In the middle of the night, having removed the window of my bedroom with a pry bar. That was the last time I was there, in Winnipeg -- almost thirty years ago.

That night was the first time this girl grabbed the camera. The first time the girl got her way. Mother was not speaking then, either. But for a different reason. I''m sure that I''ve said things to the doctor, I''m sure I''ve been asking questions, for clarifications. I''m sure some part of me has, but I haven''t been there to take note of them. The longer the conversation goes on the more I''ve been following the hand, the more I''ve been using my legs to move the body through the house to grab the things the running girl''s hands wanted to grab. Bedroom to bathroom to bedroom to kitchen to bedroom to living room to bedroom.

I cannot figure out what to focus on: the hands grabbing from my gear cabinet a lens for my Hasselblad and my old copy of Ovid''s The Metamorphoses I stole from my high school library, or the doctor who is talking about a recent study about similar aphasia in patients with Alzheimers. I focus on neither and fade into the relative peace, focusing instead on the breath in the body, until eventually the luggage is zipped up, ready, and I''m standing over it with my phone still pressed to the side of my face. I listen to the doctor but there''s nothing, just silence, because the phone call has already ended in one way or another without my realizing. I pull my phone from my ear and the side of my face is left with a rectangle of sweat. I text Karen to tell her I won''t be able to make it to the board meeting of the collective. That I have to go out of town. When she calls me a minute later, as I knew she would, I''m stuffing the luggage into the back of my little car. I stop to stare down at the vibrating phone in my hand until it stops.

Until Karen goes to voicemail. Then I close the trunk and climb in. I know that Karen won''t call again, that she''s going to rush to my house, to try and catch me, to try and get more information from me, but as I turn the car on I know there''s nothing anyone could do to stop me. The studio is a seventeen minute drive, in good traffic. I''ll be heading in the opposite direction. As I pull my car from the curb, not knowing the next time I''ll see this little house of mine, but not really caring about that house at all, I do look across the street to Genny''s house. I tried not to look, every molecule I own was instructed not to look because I knew how much that would hurt, and I knew that there was nothing I could do to stop that hurt from coming -- for me and for Genny both. She won''t understand and she will also understand too much.

I don''t call her to let her know that I''m leaving, don''t call her to let her know I''m going back to Winnipeg for the first time since we ran away together. I know that if I called her to explain before I''d made it far enough from the city to turn back, I''d never be able to make it. And I have to. Some ancient signal has been sent up to rally me back. Some signal that has told me that the road to Winnipeg, to mother, will be too overgrown if I stay way any longer than this moment. The call from the doctor has proven that it has just turned from late to too-late, but if I''m going to close any of the windows to my past, if I''m going to fight against the drafts, I have to go back right away. To make it to mother, to that city. To pretend I''ve come back just in the knick of time.

The running girl has a history of doing things far too late, of running from one burning building into another''s sparking start. As I drive north out of the city, toward Winnipeg, I try not to think about Genny, sitting unbeknownst in her office and evaluating plans for this highway or that bridge while I drive. I fail. I throw my phone into the back seat out of reach as I look at the clock and imagine her getting a call from Karen at this moment, as Karen drives toward the empty parking space in front of my house, Karen letting her know that her partner has ran away. Suddenly. Again. While I drive I keep telling myself not to look back at the phone and by the time I fail that, too, I''m too close to Winnipeg to turn the car around. This is happening.

Just north of Fargo, parked at a gas station, I finally turn around and pick up the phone from the seat. The sky is dark, spitting softly on my car. There''s a voicemail waiting for me from Genny, six missed calls and a string of texts. It takes all that I have to text Genny back: --I''ll call you tomorrow --It''s mother Then, I turn off the phone. I don''t need it for directions, for getting anywhere. I''ve already memorized the route from all the times I stared at the map and traced my finger along the here-to-there. From all the times I put the addresses into Google Maps, just to see, just to kill some time. Years and years of that, zooming in on my phone and using the farthest tip of my body to trail all those highways north.

Transcribing it into me, those directions. Home. But before I pull out of the gas station I look down at myself, bound up and packed, black jeans and a dark tee. I get out and go into the trunk and pull out a dress, a bra, and my makeup bag and I ball it all up and go into the station''s bathroom and make myself that girl. The Memory Palace You close your eyes and turn around and there it stands, two stories tall, board and batten siding painted white too-many-years ago: your memory palace. The cement walkway, with weeds growing through cracks from so many winter thaws, snakes up to the grey-blue door. A big, portrait window stares out from the first floor, stares from the living room. Two small windows glare down at you from the floor above.

Sometimes, when you turn around to face the palace you are outside the old, picket fence, where the metal mailbox hangs, but most of the time the fence is not there. So you can walk right up to the door without opening a gate that you never really knew closed. So you can go up the single step onto the landing, open the door, and go up the half step inside. The rest of the street, the rest of the city -- the world -- is not here. To make the palace work, you have to approach it excised from its contexts. Alone, as the house never has been. Without distractions, without other places to go instead, this is the only place there is. There is only weather if you choose to have it, but there is always wind.

Sometimes blowing you toward the palace, sometimes blowing you away. On the lawn, the grass is long and wispy, moving with the wind like tendrils. Like a pit of snakes. When you approach the palace, you do not step off the cement path, and on the path, you try and avoid every single crack. You fail. Inside the palace -- should you make it there -- is everything in your life that you need to remember. ∞ Twenty-seven years. It has been twenty-seven years since I last drove across the border between Manitoba and Minnesota.

It has been twenty-seven years since I stepped on the sidewalks in Wolseley. In downtown. Since I stood on the bank of the Assiniboine River. Or the.